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<title>Manifest Task</title>
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<h2><a name="manifest">Manifest</a></h2>
<h3>Description</h3>
<p>Creates a manifest file.</p>

<p>This task can be used to write a Manifest file, optionally
replacing or updating an existing file.</p>



<p>Manifests are processed according to the 
<a href="http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jar/jar.html">Jar
file specification.</a>. Specifically, a manifest element consists of
a set of attributes and sections. These sections in turn may contain
attributes. Note in particular that this may result in manifest lines
greater than 72 bytes being wrapped and continued on the next
line.</p>

<p>
  The Apache Ant team regularly gets complaints that this task in generating invalid
  manifests. By and large, this is not the case: we believe that we are following
  the specification to the letter. The usual problem is that some third party
  manifest reader is not following the same specification as well as they think
  they should; we cannot generate invalid manifest files just because one
  single application is broken. J2ME runtimes appear to be particularly troublesome.
</p>

<p>
  If you find that Ant generates manifests incompatible with your runtime, take
  a manifest it has built, fix it up however you need and switch to using the &lt;zip&gt
  task to create the JAR, feeding in the hand-crafted manifest.
</p>



<h3>Parameters</h3>
<table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td valign="top"><b>Attribute</b></td>
    <td valign="top"><b>Description</b></td>
    <td align="center" valign="top"><b>Required</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">file</td>
    <td valign="top">the manifest-file to create/update.</td>
    <td valign="top" align="center">Yes</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">mode</td>
    <td valign="top">One of "update" or "replace", default is "replace".</td>
    <td valign="top" align="center">No</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">encoding</td>
    <td valign="top">The encoding used to read the existing manifest
      when updating.  The task will always use UTF-8 when writing the
      manifest.</td>
    <td valign="top" align="center">No, defaults to UTF-8 encoding.</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">mergeClassPathAttributes</td>
    <td valign="top">Whether to merge the Class-Path attributes found
      in different manifests (if updating).  If false, only the
      attribute of the most recent manifest will be preserved.
      <em>Since Ant 1.8.0</em>.
      <br/>unless you also set flattenAttributes to true this may
      result in manifests containing multiple Class-Path attributes
      which violates the manifest specification.</td>
    <td align="center" valign="top">No, default is false</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">flattenAttributes</td>
    <td valign="top">Whether to merge attributes occurring more than
      once in a section (this can only happen for the Class-Path
      attribute) into a single attribute.
      <em>Since Ant 1.8.0</em>.</td>
    <td align="center" valign="top">No, default is false</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<h3>Nested elements</h3>
<h4><a name="attribute">attribute</a></h4>
<p>One attribute for the manifest file.  Those attributes that are
not nested into a section will be added to the "Main" section.</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td valign="top"><b>Attribute</b></td>
    <td valign="top"><b>Description</b></td>
    <td align="center" valign="top"><b>Required</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">name</td>
    <td valign="top">the name of the attribute, <br>
        must match the regexp <tt>[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9-_]*</tt>.
    </td>
    <td valign="top" align="center">Yes</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">value</td>
    <td valign="top">the value of the attribute.</td>
    <td valign="top" align="center">Yes</td>
  </tr>
</table>


<h4>section</h4>
<p>A manifest section - you can nest <a
href="#attribute">attribute</a> elements into sections.</p>

<table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td valign="top"><b>Attribute</b></td>
    <td valign="top"><b>Description</b></td>
    <td align="center" valign="top"><b>Required</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">name</td>
    <td valign="top">the name of the section.</td>
    <td valign="top" align="center">No, if omitted it will be assumed
       to be the main section.</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<h3>Examples</h3>

<pre>
  &lt;manifest file=&quot;MANIFEST.MF&quot;&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Built-By&quot; value=&quot;${user.name}&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;section name=&quot;common&quot;&gt;
      &lt;attribute name=&quot;Specification-Title&quot; value=&quot;Example&quot;/&gt;
      &lt;attribute name=&quot;Specification-Version&quot; value=&quot;${version}&quot;/&gt;
      &lt;attribute name=&quot;Specification-Vendor&quot; value=&quot;Example Organization&quot;/&gt;
      &lt;attribute name=&quot;Implementation-Title&quot; value=&quot;common&quot;/&gt;
      &lt;attribute name=&quot;Implementation-Version&quot; value=&quot;${version} ${TODAY}&quot;/&gt; 
      &lt;attribute name=&quot;Implementation-Vendor&quot; value=&quot;Example Corp.&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;/section&gt;
    &lt;section name=&quot;common/class1.class&quot;&gt;
      &lt;attribute name=&quot;Sealed&quot; value=&quot;false&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;/section&gt;
  &lt;/manifest&gt;
</pre>

<p>Creates or replaces the file MANIFEST.MF.  Note that the Built-By
attribute will take the value of the Ant property ${user.name}.  The
same is true for the ${version} and ${TODAY} properties.  This example
produces a MANIFEST.MF that contains 
<a href="http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/versioning/spec/versioning2.html#wp90779">package
version identification</a> for the package <code>common</code>.</p>

<p>The manifest produced by the above would look like this:</p>

<pre><code>Manifest-Version: 1.0
Built-By: bodewig
Created-By: Apache Ant 1.9

Name: common
Specification-Title: Example
Specification-Vendor: Example Organization
Implementation-Vendor: Example Corp.
Specification-Version: 1.2
Implementation-Version: 1.2 September 10, 2013
Implementation-Title: common

Name: common/class1.class
Sealed: false

</code></pre>


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